Independent Literary Publishing and the Legacy of Peter Owen

Thursday, March 19 6:30 pm to 8 pm GMT
309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW

This evening of discussion will shine a light on the work and legacy of the publisher Peter Owen.

Peter Owen began his publishing company on a shoestring in 1951, and the firm went on to publish ten Nobel laureates. Committed to publishing translated fiction in a country famously resistant to it, Owen brought an amazing range of writers from around the world to the UK reader — Herman Hesse, Octavio Paz, Rabindranath Tagore, Tarjei Vasaas, Yukio Mishima and Shusaku Endo. He also published a whole range of important women’s writing in English — by Anais Nin, Anna Kavan, Ithel Colquhoun, Jane Bowles, May Sarton and Marguerite Young. Owen died in 2016, living to see the rejuvenation of independent literary publishing in the UK, but his company, unlike that of his sometime collaborators and rivals, Calder and Boyars, is rarely seen as a model for contemporary independent firms. This discussion will begin to consider Peter Owen’s legacies, and what they mean contemporary literary culture.

The panel will comprise:

– Michael Caines, an editor at the Times Literary Supplement, who is writing a book on Brigid Brophy.
– Leigh Wilson (chair), author of Republishing Postwar Experimental Novels by Women: The Case of Ann Quin (2026)
– Adam Freudenheim, publisher of Pushkin Press, who bought Peter Owen’s list in 2023.
– Victoria Walker, author of the first monograph on Anna Kavan, Anna Kavan: Mid-Century Experimental Fiction (2023)

Presented by Spiracle Audiobooks.

Admission is free but please book via Eventbrite